‘More Happy Than Not,’ by Adam Silvera

If only for the outsize cultural imprint left by “The Hunger Games,” it is reasonable to argue that young adult fiction has done a far more aggressive job grappling with social inequality than much of what is rendered today in the name of literary fiction, a world where poor and ­working-class characters are so often visible merely at the periphery, if they are visible at all. The novel “Panic,” for example, by the best-selling Y.A. author Lauren Oliver, is set in a small town so devoid of prospects that graduating seniors spend their time battling it out in a game whose grand prize is the unimaginable sum of $67,000. In Laurie Halse Anderson’s “The Impossible Knife of Memory,” a teenager returns home after several years on the road with her truck-driver father, an Iraq war veteran who suffers from PTSD. We are far, in other words, from the moneyed insularities of Exeter.

To this list, we can now add “More Happy Than Not,” a beautiful debut novel by Adam Silvera, a child of the Bronx who manages a delicate knitting of class politics through an ambitious narrative about sexual identity and connection that considers the heavy weight and constructive value of traumatic memory, as well.

At the center of the story is a teenager named Aaron Soto, a lover of art and comic books, a seeker of friends, a funny and soulful product of the projects. Aaron lives in a one-bedroom apartment with his brother and their mother, who shuffles between two jobs, one at a hospital and another at a supermarket. The novel begins with the void left by Aaron’s cruel, troubled father, who committed suicide in the family’s bathtub, an act that burdens Aaron with an extreme and, of course, entirely unwarranted sense of guilt. We are, in other words, firmly on the ground of children’s literature as a vast graveyard of ­caregiving.

The book leaves vast portions of New York City at a remove, staying in Aaron’s Bronx universe, which Silvera captures with a precision that feels at once dreamy and casually reportorial. Aaron has friends and acquaintances who are better off, but they are still living modestly, and it is the simplest sort of possession that awakens his awe and envy. Describing a friend’s room, Aaron says it “smells like clean laundry and pencil shavings. . . . His bed isn’t made but it looks comfortable, unlike mine. My bed is basically one level better than a cot. He even has his own desk, whereas the only surface I can sketch on is a textbook on my lap.”

Even if its goal were merely to convey what it is like to grow up in urban poverty, Silvera’s effort would be worth declaring mandatory reading for the sort of teenager who might view winter break without a trip to Chamonix as a meaningful deprivation. But the book serves as a powerful treatise on the complexities of coming out, as well, in a place where such an announcement is not reflexively met with loving embraces from nurturing, progressive adults. Struggling with his attraction to other boys, Aaron seeks the ministrations of a shady outfit called the Leteo Institute, which is in the business of expunging painful memories through a “revolutionary” procedure. If he can erase history, he wonders, can he also erase orientation?

That experiment, so obviously doomed, functions not only as a parable of odious and all-too-real current “conversion therapies.” It’s also an apt metaphor for all the interventions — academic, psychosocial, neuropsychological, pharmaceutical — that contemporary parents seek for their children in an age when aberration is so often a condition to be obliterated and normalcy a way of being that must be molded and massaged until it looks more like excellence.

“More Happy Than Not” is, in the simplest interpretation, a novel of self-acceptance, a description that surely attaches to 90 percent of all young adult fiction ever written. But it also tells us something else: that misery, while it is always available to be romanticized (and, of course, romanticizing misery remains a default position for countless 15-year-olds), is at the same time something that cannot be disposed of. That sounds as if it might lead to trite messaging along the lines of “All that makes us suffer makes us stronger.” But what Silvera is saying is different, and profound: Hardship should always be kept close, so that we know happiness when we find it.

MORE HAPPY THAN NOT

By Adam Silvera

295 pp. Soho Teen. $18.99. (Young adult; ages 14 and up)

Ginia Bellafante writes the Big City column for the Metropolitan section of The Times.